Today MSI launches their new GeForce GTX 650 Ti Power Edition. This card comes overclocked out of the box, runs extremely quiet and has one of the lowest power consumptions we've ever seen. Especially Blu-ray power is ultra-low which might make it a candidate for a media PC.

at 165 bucks this card stands no chance against HD 7850 1GB. the pricing is bad. no other way about it. Also removing features like SLI is not good when products in the same price range come with it. The last gen products HD 6870 and GTX 560 are faster and are also selling for very good deals with prices at 140 - 170 after mail in rebates.
Currently through price cuts AMD has the better card at every price point. Nvidia is just milking the market based on the initial rave reviews for the GTX 680 and GTX 670. nice strategy. its a pity not many can see through these tricks.

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Hate to say it, but I was wrong and many other people were right: the card is clearly bottlenecked by memory. And because of it generalyy slow. Great power and noise though.

We can see it in the amazing OC results of this card (greater than core OC) compared to the Asus one. GTX 660's shader performance is only 25-30% higher, but actual gaming performance gain is over 50%, much much more than I expected.

BTW amazing performance gain across the board for Nvidia cards with 306.23 WHQL drivers. Anyone noticed that GTX660 is now just above HD7870, it was 5-10% slower with 304's.

at 165 bucks this card stands no chance against HD 7850 1GB. the pricing is bad. no other way about it. Also removing features like SLI is not good when products in the same price range come with it. The last gen products HD 6870 and GTX 560 are faster and are also selling for very good deals with prices at 140 - 170 after mail in rebates.
Currently through price cuts AMD has the better card at every price point. Nvidia is just milking the market based on the initial rave reviews for the GTX 680 and GTX 670. nice strategy. its a pity not many can see through these tricks.

One word - Underwhelming!
I see partiality... with a 9.2! If the MSRP was $140 maybe, but now 9 months behind and Nvidia knew exactly where to place and price this card and this OC'd MSI is $165 that's... clearly gouging! This probably can't keep up to a GTX560 Non-Ti, and to top it off not any OC'r. Clearly forget about any price war...

The problem find a reference card that's "wild", you take your chances seeing how it OC's. We all know that Nvidia sorts these chip and there's mild, wild, and Über; each level you pay the price of admission. That reference spec is artificially low, so yes such mild chips might provide 1020Mhz (12%), but not like you’ll have an easy time reaching 22% from many reference board at least long term. YMMV... but hey there's $150 and hope, me I say the jury is still out, and previous marketing history has exhibited it.http://techreport.com/review/23690/review-nvidia-geforce-gtx-650-ti-graphics-card

While even BF3 Nvidia’s "best of show" W1zzard OC'n went from not really playable 1920x, to still fairly lag-ie after overclock. I’ll take my chances with a $170 7850 1Gb and give it an extra 20% and enjoy. Heck W1zzarrd even wrung-out 38% from his Club version 1190Mhz at that it tops even a GTX 660 in BF3 1920x 4AA.
That's what not too shabby is...

The problem find a reference card that's "wild", you take your chances seeing how it OC's [snip]..I’ll take my chances with a $170 7850 1Gb and give it an extra 20% and enjoy...Heck W1zzarrd even wrung-out 38% from his Club version

So, overclocking is variable with Nvidia cards, and a certainty with AMD cards. Spoken like a true believer.
BTW: There are plenty of reviews- and anecdotal forum evidence, to refute your cherry picked numbers. A quick example taken from TPU's review db. HT4U's HD 7850 OC numbers- Sapphire 16% and XFX 19%...actually translating into only a 11% and 7% OC respectively, over their shipping clock...somewhat worse that than the MSI card you're ostensively supposed to commenting upon. The only card in their lineup that produced a strong OC of 20% (the PC PCS+) retails for over $200.
BTW#2: W1zzard's kind enough to do these pretty thorough reviews. The least you could do is spell the guys moniker correctly.

One word - Underwhelming! I see partiality... with a 9.2! If the MSRP was $140 maybe, but now 9 months behind and Nvidia knew exactly where to place and price this card and this OC'd MSI is $165 that's... clearly gouging! This probably can't keep up to a GTX560 Non-Ti, and to top it off not any OC'r. Clearly forget about any price war...

This card does not deserve a 9.2 when cards from last gen in the same price range like HD 6870 and GTX 560 are faster. newegg has 7 GTX 560 models from 165 - 175 even without considering mail in rebate.

Moreover performance scaling with overclocking sucks because of a 128 bit memory bus and 16 ROPs. this card is only suitable for very small cases where space is a constraint and also where the PSU is a 350 - 400w model.

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This card does not deserve a 9.2 when cards from last gen in the same price range like HD 6870 and GTX 560 are faster. newegg has 7 GTX 560 models from 165 - 175 even without considering mail in rebate.

Moreover performance scaling with overclocking sucks because of a 128 bit memory bus and 16 ROPs. this card is only suitable for very small cases where space is a constraint and also where the PSU is a 350 - 400w model.

W1zzard doesn't review prices, he reviews cards, so price should not influence the rating. Now yeah the price is a little bit high and it's specially true for these non-reference cards, and when compared to previous gen cards on the same price range, but that's been a constant with every card this gen. This generation prices are higher, they have been from the beginning. Not a single 28nm card from Nvidia or AMD has been released that offered better perf/price than 40nm counterparts. Of course there's other considerations like features, noise and power consumption (which is also money*).

Putting price aside the 650 Ti is the card on this gen that offers the biggest jump in peformance when compared to the card that it replaces (550 Ti), even if it could have been better. It has class leadership in power consumption and noise levels.

In the equation the only bad thing about it is the price and price doesn't make a product any worse or better.

* Power consumption equals a lot of $ over a 2-3 year period in many countries, especially on cards of this class, because users on this range don't typically upgrade sooner than 3 years. 2 years ago I calculated my PC power spending over a year and I found out that it roughly translates to 1 watt == 1 €. Yeah that's not a typo, for my usage that's it, I play and work on my PC and the result includes calclations for when it's idle and shut down. GTX 650 ti consumes on average 63w, HD6870 consumes 119w and 560 Ti 148w. That's a huge difference, after 3 years a 560 Ti would end up costing 250 € more than the 650 Ti. Enthusiasts upgrade more often (once a year) and pay more for their cards, while the consumption difference is hardly bigger than GTX560 vs 650, so it's less important a factor.

Exactly my thought about low-mid Keplers. This chip is simply amazing when it comes to power consumption. You pair it up with and ivy bridge i3 CPU, and you have the perfect casual gamer setup, what you can easily feed with a picoPSU.

My opinion to the 660 and above of the nvidia's kepler cards is like 'wow' (except the 660, not that much of a 'wow' ) and the most awesome thing that they did is that they force AMD to lower their card prices. But Their >$200 card is a little lacking to be honest. 640, only performs like an old 450 but with $100 price tag (7750 is just like $5 more and faster). The 650 performs like the 7750 (only a microscopic 'faster' if you don't agree), yet priced $10 more at least. And, the 7770 is faster and doesn't have that kind of a big gap (just like $5 more).

The same case with this card, minimum at $155 in newegg. This card doesn't touch the 7850 at all. And I am sure it will not even touch the 1GB 7850. And even... I found it for just $175 in newegg (just $20 more). Yes it does beat the 7770, but the 7770 is just minimum at $125 ($30 less).

Just my thoughts... nvidia should concentrate more on their sub $200 division of cards to be quite honest. Although they once released a pretty successful ~<$200 card the 460.

Also, additional stuff. I think tpu should add benchmarks only containing the 650 Ti (or whatever the card is) which is given as sample from nvidia or non-OC'd card so People wouldn't get confused about the result. Also, why is the 660 beating the 7870? I don't think it used to be like that.

nvidia did not give out samples of their own gtx 650 ti, so i used the nvidia reference bios on one of our cards. this gives perfectly accurate results for performance. next week i'll buy a gtx 650 ti reference card for future results.

My opinion to the 660 and above of the nvidia's kepler cards is like 'wow' (except the 660, not that much of a 'wow' ) and the most awesome thing that they did is that they force AMD to lower their card prices. But Their >$200 card is a little lacking to be honest. 640, only performs like an old 450 but with $100 price tag (7750 is just like $5 more and faster). The 650 performs like the 7750 (only a microscopic 'faster' if you don't agree), yet priced $10 more at least. And, the 7770 is faster and doesn't have that kind of a big gap (just like $5 more).

The same case with this card, minimum at $155 in newegg. This card doesn't touch the 7850 at all. And I am sure it will not even touch the 1GB 7850. And even... I found it for just $175 in newegg (just $20 more). Yes it does beat the 7770, but the 7770 is just minimum at $125 ($30 less).

Just my thoughts... nvidia should concentrate more on their sub $200 division of cards to be quite honest. Although they once released a pretty successful ~<$200 card the 460.

Also, additional stuff. I think TPU should add benchmarks only containing the 650 Ti (or whatever the card is) which is given as sample from nvidia or non-OC'd card so People wouldn't get confused about the result. Also, why is the 660 beating the 7870? I don't think it used to be like that.

While I stated this in some other threads already, I also do it here now: I think Keplers are not that bad on the sub $200 segment as they might seem to be. I think they do quite well when it comes to casual gaming, except one thing, and that is: "a little high prices", so I'm kinda agree with you, but I also disagree a little.

You are judging the value of the product based solely on the price. If you are an enthusiast, you snap in two 670s into your rig or even two 680s, and you won't give a flying **** about power consumption and price, but if "you" only have $150 for a card, it's suddenly turns into an entirely different story.

With hundreds of built systems behind me, I can tell you that the majority of this segment don't want and won't notice that extra difference what the 7850 offers (let alone the fact that you are comparing launch prices to a price of the product which was released half a year ago, and which will cost a lot more after 2-3 years because of the 10% extra on the electricity bills). There are many of course who want but simply can't afford a better card, and those will go for the 7850 because they still want higher performance. but the majority won't. If the budget only allows $150 for a card they won't spend $170 on it, and Nvidia knows this, and that's all they care about when they design/limit the performance of the product and when they set the price.

Nowadays casual gamers care more about how much power the card will consume, what content or games are you get with the package, 3D support, physx, etc, so these kind of practical extras, and not about fps. Not a long time ago cards like the 6850 were the all around winners, because nobody cared about these secondary attributes, but the trend is changed a lot in the segment. They want games like Call of Duty, Minecraft or Dota to run perfectly in lower resolutions (eg 768p or 1050p), while they also want it quiet and green, and they surely won't care about and/or use >=4xAA (which is one of the main weakness of these 128-192bit cards btw.)

The market of discrete graphics is shrinking rapidly, and I think Nvidia is going in the right direction now, because they give beasts for the enthusiasts and great content and value for the lower segments. All they need to do now is to lower the prices just a little bit to counter AMD's aggressive price policy.
Well let's be honest here, they are in trouble indeed, but not because the chip is bad, but because lowering prices is really hard when you are selling less..... but that's not our problem, because the greater the price war there is, the better is gonna be for us